BAAC to increase communities’ carbon credits for sale to 150 bn tonnes
The Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) said its programme to assist communities sell carbon credits has been a big success and it plans to increase the credit for sale to 150 billion tonnes of carbon absorption in seven years.
BAAC chief Chatchai Sirilai said on Monday that the state firm had been implementing a policy, which was initiated by the late King Rama IX, for farmers to grow valuable trees to use them as loan collaterals and for selling carbon credits.
Chatchat said that so far the project had been joined by 6,814 communities nationwide and 124,071 members of the project had registered 12.4 million trees with a combined value of 43 billion baht.
For 2023, the BAAC has evaluated trees of the project’s members for granting loans worth 760 million baht.
He said the BAAC Carbon Credit was an add-on to the project and it was initiated under the Thailand Voluntary Emission Reduction Programme.
So far, the BAAC has launched a pilot carbon credit project by opening two tree banks – Ban Tha Lee tree bank and Ban Mai Daeng tree bank — in Khon Kaen province with a combined carbon credit of 453 tonnnes of carbon absorption a year.
The two banks have sold the carbon credits for 1.359 million baht a year or about 3,000 baht per tonne.
But there were expenses of registering each tree, counting and verifying trees. After the expenses, the two communities received income of 951,300 baht a year, Chatchai added.
He said a rai (0.16 hectare) of land could grow 100 trees to generate 950 kilograms of carbon credit and after deducting expenses amounting to 30%, each rai would earn about 2,000 baht for each farmer, he said.
Chatchai said the BAAC hoped to expand the carbon credit project to cover more communities and areas so that about 150 billion tonnes of carbon credits would be on sale annually within seven years.
